Upgrade! San Diego, San Diego Dances, and Iron Fist

Our top three picks of San Diego events this week

Artist Michael Trigilio - Photo by Trish Stone

1 Sounds like art

Multimedia artist Michael Trigilio’s forte is sound; he uses it in electronic performances and radio and video projects to create experiential artwork that deals with religion, humor and mundane aspects of life.

Last year, the UCSD professor had a three-month residency at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art for his Neighborhood Public Radio exhibition, for which he interviewed hundreds of Angelenos about their memories of the city and then broadcasted the results across 15 different hijacked FM radio stations so that museum-goers would hear the stream of consciousness recollections as they passed through.

How else does an artist use a master’s degree in electronic music and recording media? To find out, catch Trigilio’s talk at the latest installment of Upgrade! San Diego, happening at 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 26, at the SDSU Downtown Gallery (725 W. Broadway).

“I’ll be talking about my recent works with electronics, sound and public space,” Trigilio says. “Some recent projects have included speculative religious instruments, FM-radio interventions and interpretations of astronomy through satire and performance.”

Different works of public auditory displays are what Trigilio uses to mess with people’s senses. In his 2011 exhibit, Speculative Religious Electronics, he made electronic devices that simulate sounds associated with religion so that, in theory, listening to the sounds would minimize the guilt of skipping out on church or temple obligations.

“A lot of this work that I’ve discovered, people find it funny, silly and happy, and they’ve discovered their own sort of joy from this screwing around,” Trigilio says. “I’m good at authoring a context and allowing participants to join me in discovering what’s possible.”

Trigilio will also discuss new projects, one of which is a collaboration with an astrophysicist that investigates alternate ways of representing cosmic information.

“A lot of what I’ve been doing for the past year are speculative projects,” he says, “thinking about the future and its connection to the present moment through these art projects.” upgradesandiego.info

2 The lobbyists

Spreckels Theatre (121 Broadway, Down-town) is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Half the theater’s grandeur is its neoclassical lobby, which has been all spiffed up to mark the centennial. At 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Oct. 26 and 27, the PGK Dance Project will present San Diego Dances—inSpreckels’ lobby. The performances are part of PGK’s biannual “mini-festival,” for which the always-innovative dance company, headed by Peter G. Kalivas, finds unique spaces and then choreographs dances—seven for this event—befitting the space. (Other locations have included an art gallery and hair salon.) Advance tickets are $20 ($25 at the door), and parents who bring a kid between the ages of 8 and 16 get in free when the kid forks over $10. thepgkdanceproject.org

3 Collective soundtrack

On a recent episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, correspondent John Oliver played a video clip from the second presidential debate and dubbed it with a scene from CSI: Miami. Hilarious. ArtPower will do something sort of similar with a screening of Iron Fist, a 1927 Mexican film by Gabriel Garcia Moreno about a young couple trapped in a world of vice, at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 25. It won’t be dubbed with David Caruso one-liners; it’ll be soundtracked by the electronic Norteño sounds of Nortec Collective’s Bostich + Fussible, who’ll play live as the film screens in UCSD’s Price Center East Ballroom. Tickets range from $11 to $18. UCSD’s The Loft will host an afterparty. www.artpwr.com/events/1011

Does your event deserve to be in our top three? Email our events editor, Alex Zaragoza. You can also bug her on Twitter.